Dot Wordsworth on words lost in translation

My husband’s club was closed in August, which meant, paradoxically, that I saw less of him, because he enjoyed the chance to exercise reciprocal rights at other clubs, which I suspect might not have welcomed him as a member in the first place. Sitting in some smokeless smoking-room he took to reading the Financial Times, and there he saw an article by Michael Skapinker on the uses of simplified English. Apparently, Voice of America broadcasts some programmes in something called Special English, which has about 1,500 words, in comparison with an educated Englishman’s vocabulary of 30,000.

In response to the FT article, David Gibbons, a translator with a Milan bank wrote in, making two points: that English is not just a means of communication between non-native speakers, and that when it comes to translation, the simple words can be the most difficult to translate.

An example he gave was the Italian comunicare, which, he says, is rarely well translated as ‘communicate’.